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> For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one. That's the part about NFTs that I keep gett

> For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one. That's the part about NFTs that I keep getting hung up on, yes. I get the abstract notion of creating artificial scarcity for digital goods, and how that could have market value. But we've seen absurd things like "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet," with no verification that the NFT is being created by anyone who has any legally-recognized right to the tweet's content. If an artist tweets out an image of a new art piece of theirs and I mint an NFT from the tweet, what exactly do I have "ownership" of? I sure don't have any rights to the artwork. I don't even have any rights to the tweet text, which is implicitly copyrighted by its author. And it's that sort of foofery, more than anything else, which makes me more inclined to be skeptical. Obviously there are NFTs created by legitimate copyright holders who can legally transfer ownership or other rights to you, but the legal recognition of the ownership doesn't seem to have anything to do with the inclusion of the NFT in the transaction -- the NFT itself can't verify that it was minted by someone who had the necessary legal rights to assign ownership of the thing the token represents.

exporectomy 5y ago
A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change their mental model. The denial has to be aggressive because it's so emotionally dangerous to let yourself lose your grip on your existing beliefs. That kind of hysteresis or stickiness of beliefs is a good thing because it allows us to build elaborate consistent useful models of the world without upending it at every random new idea. But it also means old set-in-their-ways people aren't good at adopting cutting edge ideas.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  > giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    You know, there are people in the space who talk a lot about adding utility to NFTs. This may well work for tickets or whatever, but the kind of NFTs we talk about here don't benefit from utility; art doesn't benefit from utility. I agree with the OP that a lot of people here seem unwilling to take a moment and think about this more deeply, and how NFTs might compare to existing ways of valuing things. To be fair, it does take some time to wrap your head around, and maybe an open mind. People complaining about a lack of "real" ownership often seem to mean ownership as in owning the copyright, but note that during the piracy debates of 00s the tech world spent a lot of effort trying to convince the world that a copyright claim is fundamentally different than physical ownership. And so it is. There is physical ownership over a digital file; and that is having physical access to the bits that make of that file. NFTs work because of the realization that a significant part of the value of physical artworks has nothing to do with there physical form. Now there remain a lot of open questions; for example, it may well be that the physical form is still somehow essential, even if a small part of the value. Yves Kleins Immaterial Zones don't seem to be trading a lot at Sothebys, as interesting as a concept they may be. People may well feel the value of hanging your Rothko in a home is a very important part of the experience, even if 99.9% of the value is simply provenance (which an NFT artificially creates for digital goods). It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
      I think you have outlined the fundamental disagreement quite well. > It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so. I think when people see utility in physical artwork, to the point they would travel to the other side of the world to see it, they find it hard to credit that almost all the value comes from provenance. Likewise I think people who see art as nothing more than the name of the person who painted it will wholly embrace NFTs as investments. These two groups are probably not going to come to an agreement.

exporectomy 5y ago

A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change their mental model. The denial has to be aggressive because it's so emotionally dangerous to let yourself lose your grip on your existing beliefs. That kind of hysteresis or stickiness of beliefs is a good thing because it allows us to build elaborate consistent useful models of the world without upending it at every random new idea. But it also means old set-in-their-ways people aren't good at adopting cutting edge ideas.

teruakohatu 5y ago
> giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  You know, there are people in the space who talk a lot about adding utility to NFTs. This may well work for tickets or whatever, but the kind of NFTs we talk about here don't benefit from utility; art doesn't benefit from utility. I agree with the OP that a lot of people here seem unwilling to take a moment and think about this more deeply, and how NFTs might compare to existing ways of valuing things. To be fair, it does take some time to wrap your head around, and maybe an open mind. People complaining about a lack of "real" ownership often seem to mean ownership as in owning the copyright, but note that during the piracy debates of 00s the tech world spent a lot of effort trying to convince the world that a copyright claim is fundamentally different than physical ownership. And so it is. There is physical ownership over a digital file; and that is having physical access to the bits that make of that file. NFTs work because of the realization that a significant part of the value of physical artworks has nothing to do with there physical form. Now there remain a lot of open questions; for example, it may well be that the physical form is still somehow essential, even if a small part of the value. Yves Kleins Immaterial Zones don't seem to be trading a lot at Sothebys, as interesting as a concept they may be. People may well feel the value of hanging your Rothko in a home is a very important part of the experience, even if 99.9% of the value is simply provenance (which an NFT artificially creates for digital goods). It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago
    I think you have outlined the fundamental disagreement quite well. > It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so. I think when people see utility in physical artwork, to the point they would travel to the other side of the world to see it, they find it hard to credit that almost all the value comes from provenance. Likewise I think people who see art as nothing more than the name of the person who painted it will wholly embrace NFTs as investments. These two groups are probably not going to come to an agreement.